Nik Mayer

Nikolas Mayer

Nik has worked multiple fortune 500 companies, in addition to multiple public sector agencies.  These companies and agencies include Ford Motor Company, Department of Homeland Security – Science and Technology directorate (DHS S&T), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC), in addition to The United States Foundation for the Commemoration of the World Wars to name a few. 

With over 15 years of professional agile, including Scrum, experience both in project and product management, he has the ability to easily take a holistic look at the entire life cycle of the project to allow for easy communication and collaboration between teams, team members, and stakeholders.  This ability to facilitate easy communication, regardless of technical background.  In addition, this enables him to easily identify potential blockers, team dynamic issues, deliverable timeline management, or potential negative ROI impacts as well.  Nik’s Scrum experience include Team Member roles, the Product Owner role, in addition to the Scrum Master role (unofficially). 

On at least one project, the team decided to stray from the traditional Scrum path due to project requirements and the reality of what the project was.  Due to the number of Scrum teams being part of the project, we would add some “Scrum-of-Scrums” meetings within the sprint to allow the larger group to easily communicate between the various teams. 

Specifics of the Scrum roles he has had are as follows:

Team Member roles – As a Scrum team member on multiple project, my roles help to facilitate the completion of projects.  Through sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint review, in addition to the sprint retrospective meetings the Scrum team (including the Product Owner and Scrum Master) would apply Scrum fundamentals to achieve the completion of agreed stories for the given sprint.  In addition to this, the team would work out the team’s working agreements for each team, or whenever the team would change. 

Product Owner role –As a product owner, the primary function of the role is to own the product backlog and be the single voice of truth as the authority on the product.  I would facilitate this role.  Within the organization, they allowed me to have the final say on features and backlog priority, as I had the challenge of knowing the legacy product in addition to the legacy reasons behind why certain logic within the product was there. 

It was an interesting challenge (both positive and negative) to move from a team member to the Product Owner.  A challenging time was when I had to “pull rank” and reject the product demoed because it didn’t fully comply.  Unfortunately, the team took it personally and I had to realign the team to understand why I had to reject their product.  One this happened, the team was back to full creativity and full potential.  I also attribute the role change from team member to product owner to this quick turn around on productivity.  I attribute this to the team possessing the knowledge of the type of person I was as a fellow team member “in the trenches” with them.

Scrum Master role – As a Scrum Master I would help to facilitate the Scrum Alliance framework and practices within the team.  I would help in running daily Scrum meetings, ensure that the team would consistently adhere to the Scrum Alliance standards and framework, in addition to assisting the project managers in timeline scoping.  This was especially challenging, as the Scrum Alliance does not want story points to be associated to time.  Unfortunately, in the real world, this organization was all time focused as this is how they would be bill for services rendered.